The employment rate in Portugal remained at 62% in the first quarter of this year unchanged from the previous quarter and up 1.7% year-on-year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported Wednesday.

However, amongst the younger population, between 15 to 24 years old, the employment rate fell back from 23% in the final quarter of 2013 to 21.9% in the first quarter of this year.

The OECD figures show that at the end of March some 4.236 million people were in work in Portugal with the male employment rate standing at 64.9% against the female rate of 59.2%. The total population is estimated at 10,600 million.

Across the Eurozone, the employment outlook improved slightly with the first quarter ending with 63.8% of people in work against a figure of 63.6% four months earlier.

Compared with the first quarter of 2013, the employment rate increased in about two thirds of OECD countries. The largest gains were observed in Hungary (up 4.3 percentage points to 61.7%) and New Zealand (up 1.9 percentage points to 74.5%) while the largest falls were recorded in the Netherlands (down 1.0 percentage point to 73.7%), Australia (down 0.7 percentage point to 71.6%) and Denmark (down 0.7 percentage point to 72.0%).